was Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  When this man and his friends found that in white churches they were not treated with courtesy, they said, We shall have our own church; we shall have our own bishop; we shall build up our own enterprises in any line whatsoever; and even to-day the church that Allen founded remains as the greatest single effort of the race in organization.  The foremost representative of the opposing line of thought was undoubtedly Frederick Douglass, who in a speech in Rochester in 1848 said:  “I am well aware of the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons from white churches, and the consequent necessity for erecting their own places of worship.  This evil I would charge upon its originators, and not the colored people.  But such a necessity does not now exist to the extent of former years.  There are societies where color is not regarded as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations.”  There is much more difference between these two positions than can be accounted for by the mere lapse of forty years between the height of the work of Allen and that of Douglass.  Allen certainly did not sanction segregation under the law, and no man worked harder than he to relieve his people from proscription.  Douglass moreover, who did not formally approve of organizations that represented any such distinction as that of race, again and again presided over gatherings of Negro men.  In the last analysis, however, it was Allen who was foremost in laying the basis of distinctively Negro enterprise, and Douglass who felt that the real solution of any difficulty was for the race to lose itself as quickly as possible in the general body politic.

[Footnote 1:  Nell:  Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 356.]

We have seen that the Church was from the first the race’s foremost form of social organization, and that sometimes in very close touch with it developed the early lodges of such a body as the Masons.  By 1800 emancipation was well under way; then began emigration from the South to the central West; emigration brought into being the Underground Railroad; and finally all forces worked together for the development of Negro business, the press, conventions, and other forms of activity.  It was natural that states so close to the border as Pennsylvania and Ohio should be important in this early development.

The Church continued the growth that it had begun several decades before.  The A.M.E. denomination advanced rapidly from 7 churches and 400 members in 1816 to 286 churches and 73,000 members by the close of the Civil War.  Naturally such a distinctively Negro organization could make little progress in the South before the war, but there were small congregations in Charleston and New Orleans, and William Paul Quinn blazed a path in the West, going from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.